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Severance
by Ling Ma
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Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though.…
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"In Severance, the apocalypse arrives in the shape of a loop. It’s a disease that traps its victims in endless cycles of rote tasks: setting and resetting a table, folding luxury polos in a Fifth Avenue boutique. The pandemic knocks Candace Chen out of her own monotonous office routine and sends her on a cross-country trek with a group of survivors, led by a worryingly despotic IT worker. Like any good dystopia, it’s the familiarity that rattles you most. Ling Ma’s mischievous, unsparing prose forces you to confront your own daily rituals to consider where exactly they are taking you. It may leave you staring wistfully out your office window, hoping for signs of an impending cataclysm – just to shake things up."
""Severance," the astonishing, rollicking office building/apocalypse debut by Ling Ma."
"Severance deservedly got a lot of attention when it came out in 2018. It’s a brilliant book, the one on this list that I most strongly recommend to people trying to take their mind off the news. It takes the issues that the Newsflesh books also consider and politicizes them in a different way. It is about the intersection of immigration and global capitalism in modern cities and the breakdown of human communication and meaningful human contacts that occur as a consequence. Golden age mysteries and other classics of escapist fiction are another route, but even the best escapist fiction deals with weighty issues. I hope that these books might suspend, for a little while, some of the anxiety we feel while following moment-by-moment news of disasters in the media. Personally I find that entrance into the world of immersive fiction itself offers pleasure and relief from stress, even if the novel’s content is dark or dystopian."